Tomorrow, the voters in seven states and the District of Columbia go to the polls to conclude the primary election season. The most closely-watched race on the ballot will be the race between long-time at-large liberal Republican Congressman Mike Castle and Tea Party-backed conservative insurgent Christine O’Donnell for the Republican nomination for the open Senate seat previously vacated by Joe Biden. Because the election is | Read More »
Until September 11, 2001, I worked in the World Trade Center, halfway up Tower One. I wasn’t doing political blogging at the time, but was writing “the Baseball Crank” as a weekly baseball column for the online edition of the Providence (R.I.) Journal. Here’s my account of that day, written for ProJo two days later while it was all still fresh. We run this every | Read More »
That was then: Barack Obama will require you to work. He is going to demand that you shed your cynicism. That you put down your divisions. That you come out of your isolation, that you move out of your comfort zones. That you push yourselves to be better. And that you engage. Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, | Read More »
So the reviews have begun to come in for Markos Moulitsas’ book “American Taliban,” which argues that American conservatives are just like the Taliban, and they’re…well, let me start with Jamelle Bouie’s review at the left-wing The American Prospect: Given the subject matter and his own influence, Moulitsas is sure to find a large audience for American Taliban. This wouldn’t be a problem if the | Read More »
It’s debatable what’s the most loyally Democratic district in the country, but NY’s 15th District would have to be in the running. The district, centered in Harlem, went 87% for Al Gore in 2000, 90% for John Kerry in 2004, and 93% for Barack Obama in 2008, is rated D+41 by Charlie Cook, and in various formats has been represented in Congress since 1971 by | Read More »
When it comes to the ‘framing’ of public discourse on entitlements, Paul Krugman is accustomed to writing columns that are more about issuing commands than making arguments; he has railed in the past even against President Obama for admitting that yes, we do have a problem paying for the explosive present and future growth of entitlements. But even for this genre of “there is no | Read More »
Last night, as part of a Ramadan celebration, President Obama waded into the controversy over the Cordoba Initiative mosque within sight of Ground Zero. In so doing, he unambiguously chose sides with those who see this deliberate provocation as a positive good. It is unsurprising, given what we already know about him, that President Obama would decline to support using government power to block the | Read More »
The debate over the “Ground Zero Mosque” presents two separate questions: (1) Whether the mosque is wrong and should be stopped. (2) Whether some arm of the government should be the ones to stop it. Tellingly, liberal defenders of the project have talked almost exclusively about the second point, and avoided the first. While I joined wholeheartedly in the RedState editorial last week condemning the | Read More »
UPDATE: Well, the story had been confirmed by a friend of Stevens, but it appears we are in “fog of war” territory here as far as news is concerned. Former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens has been confirmed killed in a small-plane crash in Alaska this morning. Stevens was 86. It’s ironic that Senator Stevens would meet his end in a plane crash; he earned the | Read More »
Judge Vaughan Walker, the chief district judge of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, handed down his post-trial decision yesterday in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, holding that Proposition 8 – the referendum approved by California voters in 2008, amending the California Constitution to define marriage as between a man and a woman and thus deny recognition to same-sex “marriages” – violates the | Read More »
Much of the behavior of Democratic Senate candidates can be explained by one simple fact: very few of them are going to get 50% of the vote this fall. Even the candidates who have a good chance to win are going to struggle to get to 50%. Let’s take a quick look at the RealClearPolitics polling averages for the 22 Senate races that RCP lists | Read More »
If you want to see a rank example of the unhealthy symbiosis between Big Government and Big Business, consider this morning’s announcement by BP that “it will set up a $100 million charitable fund to support unemployed oil rig workers experiencing economic hardship due to the deepwater drilling moratorium imposed by the Obama administration.” At first glance, you might say, this is a good thing: | Read More »
New annual poll from Gallup on who America’s most trusted institutions are – and it’s almost entirely bad news for the Left. Topping the list? Five institutions consistently targeted and mistrusted by the Left: (1) the military (trusted by 76%), (2) small business (66%, the only other institution over 60), (3) the police, (4) church/organized religion, and (5) the medical system. The bottom? Congress (11% | Read More »
Do deficits matter? The Obama Administration has been in something of a quandary lately as to whether to primarily emphasize its plans to spend more taxpayer money as “stimulus” or to paint itself as fighting against deficits. The former has the advantage of looking like the White House is doing – or trying against GOP opposition to do – something about the economy and its | Read More »
President Obama should fire General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, for a highly impolitic interview Gen. McChrystal gave to Rolling Stone magazine (of all places) mocking the Vice President and the U.S. Ambassador in Afghanistan, among others, and making evident his disdain for the Administration’s civilian management of the war effort. Obama should fire him – but he’s painted himself into a corner | Read More »
News came Monday that the Israeli navy had boarded a flotilla of ships seeking to run Israel’s blockade of Gaza, setting off an incident that ended with the Israelis shooting a number of people on board the ship. The immediate controversy is over what happened on board: the Israelis say they were attacked upon boarding by assailants wielding knives and clubs. Who you believe depends | Read More »
With Danny Tarkanian apparently fading, the June 8 Nevada Senate primary race to face Harry Reid is going to come down to conservative Sharron Angle against moderate, establishment candidate Sue Lowden. Lowden has already kicked up a fuss with the observation that in the days before health insurance, people who lacked money for care – at least in rural areas and small towns – would | Read More »
I noted this in RedHot yesterday – a great Mark Steyn column, as usual, on Greece and what it means: From the Times of London: “The President of Greece warned last night that his country stood on the brink of the abyss after three people were killed when an anti-government mob set fire to the Athens bank where they worked.” Almost right. They were not | Read More »
The NY Times has the story; the longtime crusading state Attorney General (he was Eliot Spitzer before Eliot Spitzer was), Richard Blumenthal has sometimes just implied it, but on other occasions (including one the NYT has on video) he’s said outright that he served in the Marines in Vietnam, when in fact he enlisted in a stateside Marine Reserve unit only near the end of | Read More »
Hey, remember when we conservatives said that if you let the federal government into everybody’s healthcare, pretty soon it will stick its peering eyes and groping hands into our personal business? Welcome to “pretty soon,” thanks to Wisconsin Democrat Ron Kind. Kind has introduced a bill that would commandeer your health insurer to report to the federal government the body mass index (BMI) – i.e., | Read More »
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